Just like Dorothy in the Wiz­ard of Oz, I yearn for a bet­ter place, a place where com­mon sense and decency trumps greed and avarice, a world where FAS State­ment 157 and FAS State­ment 159 won’t exist and man­age­ment teams won’t be able to make up pre­tend finan­cial state­ments with impunity. I believe in a […] [read full story]

Some­times real­ity is stranger than fic­tion and mark to mar­ket account­ing is one of the strangest real­i­ties in gen­er­a­tions. By adopt­ing FAS State­ment 157 (Fair Value Account­ing) and the related FAS State­ment 159 (the Fair Value Option for Finan­cial Assets and Lia­bil­i­tites), the Finan­cial Account­ing Stan­dards Board (“FASB”) has made cor­po­rate earn­ings a trip down […] [read full story]

Today the Wall Street Jour­nal reported on an early look at the expected British Bankers’ Asso­ci­a­tion (the “BBA”) LIBOR reforms http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121140613207512091.html. The issue that the BBA is try­ing to address is how to pre­vent sus­pected manip­u­la­tion and col­lu­sion on the part of the banks that report LIBOR to the BBA. The BBA decided to act after […] [read full story]

I have been an out­spo­ken critic of too much lever­age in the finan­cial sys­tem for the past sev­eral years. On CNBC and Fox Busi­ness Net­work I have spo­ken out against the dan­gers of bank and bro­ker­age over lever­age and sug­gested that such over lever­age could cause a repeat of the Great Depres­sion. Like a giant […] [read full story]

Today the Wall Street Jour­nal reported that Fed offi­cials have been in con­tact with the British Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion regard­ing poten­tial manip­u­la­tion of the LIBOR rate. While the Fed is once again pur­su­ing a “bet­ter late than never” strat­egy of pro­tect­ing the integrity of the bank­ing sys­tem, the rest of Wash­ing­ton seems to have gone AWOL […] [read full story]